In Bibliophile Heaven: At the Grolier Club in New York City

Ralph Gardner Jr. Visits the Grolier Club

By

Ralph Gardner Jr.

June 11, 2013 10:45 p.m. ET

My edition of "The Great Gatsby" has all the points that let you know it's a first rather than a subsequent edition. These include the misprint "sick in tired" on page 205. (I just double-checked the page and found two more typos. They're in the part where Meyer Wolfsheim, Gatsby's unsavory business associate, pulls Nick Carraway into his office and tells him about his first encounter with Gatsby; the italics are mine: "He hadn't eat anything for a couple of days. 'Come on have some lunch with me,' I sid. He ate more than four dollars' worth of food in half an hour.")

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The Temples of Flora display at The Grolier Club.
Cassandra Giraldo for The Wall Street Journal

Those misprints are delicately underlined in pencil. Not by me—I've owned the book since the late-1960s, but it's the first time I've spotted them. It was probably done by the person who sold it to me—a bookseller in Princeton, N.J., who I visited with my father, possibly in connection with an interview I was having at the Princeton admissions office.

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A display in the Garden Club of America exhibiton dedicated to flower illustration.
Cassandra Giraldo for The Wall Street Journal

My father's game plan was to have me collect American first editions and portray me as some sort of bibliographic whiz kid, hoping Princeton would want me to round out their incoming freshman class in the way a star high school quarterback or teenage violin prodigy might.

Unfortunately, they didn't. But "Gatsby," among other first editions I collected in that era, served as my consolation prize. I don't remember the name of the Princeton bookseller or his store—though my dad undoubtedly would were he still around—but I do recall his surprised reaction when I discovered the first edition on a dusty shelf in the back of the shop. He apparently wasn't aware he had it, but was obligated to sell it to me for the price he'd long ago penciled in: $10.

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Eric Holzenberg, the director of The Grolier Club.
Cassandra Giraldo for The Wall Street Journal

The "Gatsby" with its original green cloth cover (unfortunately, it doesn't have the extremely rare dust jacket, which would boost its value twenty-fold to over $100,000) is one of my connections to my father. An even stronger one is the curious bits of paper that reside just inside the front cover. These are clippings from book catalogues, the first one dated 1972, that document the Fitzgerald classic's rise in value over the years.

In '72, it was offered for $60. By 1974, the value had jumped to $160. In 1997, it was priced at $1,500, and the most recent slip of paper, from a Bauman Rare Books catalogue in April of this year, puts the price at $5,500.

My father's practice, which he inculcated in me, was to cut the entry from the catalogue and scribble the year. The ostensible purpose was to know what it was worth in case you ever wanted to sell it. But it also served as a reflection of his passion for books; and even more than a passion for their intellectual merit, for books as objects, objects he owned that doubled as shrewd investments.

Indeed, one of my most steadfast memories of my father is of him sitting behind the desk in his library poring over book catalogues in search of works he owned or wanted to buy if the price was right—an activity that never seemed to grow old.

It turns out there's a club for people like him, and one that he belonged to. Called the Grolier Club—it's named after a Renaissance collector—it has been around since 1884 and moved to its current clubhouse, on East 60th Street, in 1917.

"We were the first organization in the U.S. to do exhibitions of books as if they were paintings or sculpture," Eric Holzenberg, the club's director, told me when I visited for the first time recently. "We existed before the Morgan Library, the New York Public Library, the Metropolitan Museum, largely."

The organization had done some research and discovered that my father's membership lapsed in 1992. You'd have to ask him why—and unfortunately that's impossible—but from Mr. Holzenberg's description of the place, it would seem a perfect match for my father's interests.

As a matter of fact, when he gave me a tour, Mr. Holzenberg pointed out the club's most popular spot—a long table in the library covered with the latest bookseller and auction catalogues. My dad would have felt right at home.

"It's for anyone who has a passion for the book as object," Mr. Holzenberg explained of the organization. "Not just collectors, but also fine press printers, book designers, librarians."

The club's current exhibition of gardening books—up until July 27 and organized by the Garden Club of America, another somewhat esoteric organization in the neighborhood—seems a good fit. It's a quietly sumptuous show of treasured volumes that starts with Emmanuel Sweert's hand-colored 1612 "Florilegium Amplissumum et Selectissimum." One of the earliest flower catalogues, it's said to have set off the "Tulipomania" craze in Europe.

There's also Philip Miller's 1768 "The Gardeners Dictionary; Containing the Best and Newest Methods of Cultivating and Improving the Kitchen, Fruit, Flower Garden, and Nursery."

"Jefferson had this edition," explained Staci Catron, the director of the Cherokee Garden Library in Atlanta. She was preparing to deliver a lecture that evening called "Digging Deep: The Influence of Garden Literature on Southern Landscapes." (The Grolier also hosts exhibits of its own and lectures throughout the year, many of which are open to the public.) "Washington had an earlier edition. It was the late-18th-century gardening bible. If you had any means you had this book."

Ms. Catron, a historian and author as well as a librarian, pointed out another favorite volume of our third president. I neglected to write down the name but she described it as "all about fruit," a designation I suspect could apply to several other books in the show. Indeed, the exhibition also includes a volume described as the earliest illustrated book "devoted totally to citrus."

"He had huge orchards at Monticello," Ms. Catron continued. "And he was obsessed with fruit trees."

This exchange may not have had much to do with the Grolier Club—except that it does, books having a marvelous talent for triggering conversation. Mr. Holzenberg told me the Grolier has 800 members, of which approximately a quarter live within a 50-mile radius of the city.

In a world of e-books, such an organization would seem an endangered species. But if the director is hearing footsteps, it didn't show.

"Young people, it gives them a change," he said of physical books. "They're very turned on by this retro."

I asked to see the library, though the club's townhouse seems one big library, with thousands more volumes in off-site storage. The only room not lined with books is a replica Dutch tavern, a relic from the club's early days that I understand is mired in a bit of controversy at the moment—between members who want to keep it and those who want to see it go.

As my father's son, though his membership is well past due, I vote it stays. While books have an allure all their own, especially for bibliophiles, I've never known a gin and tonic, or a good single malt, to detract from their appreciation.

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